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Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

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Re: Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

#31

Post by geooff_ »

This is huge. As someone who's put together a somewhat cohesive product but wants to take the next step in "formalizing" components there is a huge missing piece for design.

If I know my backend works I can use claude to add sufficient tests and iterate from there, improving code maturity. If my UX looks good how can I formalize it and do the same?

I can't wait to try this out. My current workflow has been use MCP to screenshot the whole app --> Use a tool like Codia to go from screenshot to components, as a non-designer its miserable though.

Re: Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

#32

Post by dhumph »

This is interesting, and I keep waiting for figma to release prompt to design without going thru Make. It must be touch to crack-or it will hurt their business model. The plug-ins in the space don’t respect components in the toolkit. Curious how far you can push this “Make a login form using my component library “ “Create no new design layouts of the selected frame” Can’t wait to try this out!

Re: Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

#33

Post by mleo »

kordlessagain wrote: post #26
falloutx wrote: post #4

I like how MCP is not shoved into our face anymore after people realised more mcp servers eat into context and agents can easily use CLI tools.

And how do the agents use the CLI tools, exactly?

Same way you would in a terminal.

You can provide the agent details to use either through skills or commands that provide reference and context to use. The agent can load when needed.

Having cli tool access provides me option to run the tools when I want to look at or do something as well.

Re: Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

#34

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

travisd wrote: post #28

At $DAYJOBSTARTUP, we do hackathons twice a year. At the most recent one, an engineer sat down with a designer and set him up with Cursor. The designer looked like a kind in a candy shop, he was so excited to be able to rapidly prototype with natural language and not be clicking in Figma for hours. A month later, he comes back to the engineering team with a 10k line "index.html" file asking "How do I hand this off?"…

Why not just give him a branch? I've found underestimating "non-technical" people a folly in the AI era. They can easily boot up projects with agentic AI assistance.

Re: Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

#35

Post by kcrwfrd_ »

travisd wrote: post #28

At $DAYJOBSTARTUP, we do hackathons twice a year. At the most recent one, an engineer sat down with a designer and set him up with Cursor. The designer looked like a kind in a candy shop, he was so excited to be able to rapidly prototype with natural language and not be clicking in Figma for hours. A month later, he comes back to the engineering team with a 10k line "index.html" file asking "How do I hand this off?"…

Haha I did the same with our product manager and designers. One of our designers just got her first (tiny) PR merged this week.

I am somewhat fearful of having created a monster, but at the same time I think it’s good to knock down barriers to knowledge and learning. All else equal, I think a designer or PM with some exposure to code is better than one without.

What I’m fearful of are 10k line PRs and pressure from product to “just ship it.” Past a certain threshold a PR will be really tough to review, to the point that it would be preferable for an engineer to have handled it from the start.

I think we will need deeper integration between figma and the codebase/storybook. Shared color palette definitions, integration of storybook components with figma components, stuff like that.

The Figma MCP that you can use to handover to your agent and simply say “implement this” is already pretty impressive.

Re: Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

#37

Post by F7F7F7 »

travisd wrote: post #28

At $DAYJOBSTARTUP, we do hackathons twice a year. At the most recent one, an engineer sat down with a designer and set him up with Cursor. The designer looked like a kind in a candy shop, he was so excited to be able to rapidly prototype with natural language and not be clicking in Figma for hours. A month later, he comes back to the engineering team with a 10k line "index.html" file asking "How do I hand this off?"…

This is doable. I set something similar up at scale. Figma Variables/Tokens -> Token Studio (Style Dictionary, essentially) -> Our Component library Storybook -> MCP

Atomic component system, good page level template coverage, great prop support.

The LLM consumer nor the designer is allowed to write directly back to the library. Those changes need to go through a governance process to prevent drift as their are multiple product teams consuming it and we still don't have a reliable way to make sure Figma and the component library are always 1:1. Maybe in a company of a single designer.

So while this setup is arguably more fleshed out than what you have it still requires multiple humans in the loop.

Sure, there are a billion Medium articles about how it can be done with tokens but its much messier at any kind of scale.

Re: Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

#38

Post by max2 »

dhumph wrote: post #32

This is interesting, and I keep waiting for figma to release prompt to design without going thru Make. It must be touch to crack-or it will hurt their business model. The plug-ins in the space don’t respect components in the toolkit. Curious how far you can push this “Make a login form using my component library “ “Create no new design layouts of the selected frame” Can’t wait to try this out!

It’s not too challenging, but it requires additional context from the design system to achieve a good result.

Re: Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents

#40

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

dannote wrote: post #29
dannote wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will add vector path manipulation soon!

Just shipped in 0.6.0! New path commands: # Read path data figma-use path get # Set new path figma-use path set "M10,10 L90,50 L10,90 Z" # Transform existing paths figma-use path move --dx 100 --dy 50 figma-use path scale --factor 2 figma-use path flip --axis x SKILL.md updated too

can you now generate pelican driving a bicycle now?
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